Tuesday, January 1, 2013

The Precarious World of College Coaches and ADs

As I reflect on the new year I can’t help
but think about the 25 college football coaches who changed jobs at the end of last
year. About 20 were fired, and the rest moved to new jobs. The coaching
slaughter at D1 athletics occurs annually. Sometimes it is richly deserved as
with Bobby Petrino for his scurrilous lying and cheating at Arkansas. This year
we learned elite college coaches now only have two years to turn around programs with Jon Embree at Colorado. Sometimes it ends a fine career as with Ted
Tedford’s ten years at Cal. This predictable year-end carnage got me to
thinking of how brutal college athletics leadership has become, and how insecure
the tenure is for the senior elite college athletic leaders—coaches and
athletic directors. I believe this remarkable insecurity helps drive the craziness of recruiting, cheating
and salaries in elite college sports.

To get some perspective I thought over my almost
eight years serving as a faculty athletic representative in the Pacific 10/12
conference. While my numbers may not be perfect based upon faulty memory, here
is the carnage of the 10 original Pac 10 schools over that 8-year period:

The PAC 10/12 is a destination conference;
most leave involuntarily. Only six left voluntarily, one to be
a college vice president and one to be a conference commissioner, 2 to the NFL
and 1 to the NBA. The rest left under duress. Athletic directors and head football and basketball coaches
do not get fired or hired these days without the involvement of the college presidents. This means
all these firings involved the complicity of the President and often regents of
the university.

NCAA President Mark Emmert dislikes the
locution “business of college athletics,” so do I. Maybe the "enterprise of
college athletics?" Not sure, but no words can hide the brittle brutal reality
that coaches and athletic directors get fired if they do not win. Winning brings revenue and prestige and can temporarily satisfy insatiable boosters. As I learned, it
does not matter how many students you graduate; it almost does not matter how
many minor or line skirting violations you have, unless you bring horrible
scandal to the university. The reality and incentives for coaches and athletic
directors are clear—Win.
Commentators scream and bemoan the
cheating and legal shading and excessive rules of the NCAA. But this
constellation is all connected. Coaches and athletic director must win. They
know that and despite the rhetoric, little else matters. The frantic drive to
win and win fast and continue winning, drives the obsession with recruiting. It
drives the obsession with keeping student athletes happy once they arrive. It
drives the fixation on high salaries to get the best coaching talent, but also
the knowledge of the coach that they can be fired in an instant even for a
winning season. These drives are fed by possessive,
obsessive and over-involved boosters who pay for the bloated salaries
and new facilities as well as sponsor the skirting of the rules outside of the boundaries of
the program. The inordinate power of the boosters also accounts for how little
time coaches now have to build programs and how little leeway they have to have
a bad season or two. Even as
astoundingly successful coach as Chip Kelly at Oregon finds himself on the outs
with boosters because he does not kowtow to their whims.

This win or nothing environment and the
reality that a coach or AD can go from hero to pariah in three months shapes
the environment that molds coaches and athletic directors.

We all know how tightly strung modern
college coaches are. These are not laid back guys; they are driven
competitors and hate to lose as much as they love to win. We see them go off like volcanoes on the sideline
sometimes against their own players or assistants. At practices they can
sometimes seem almost maniacal in their intensity and demands on 19 year olds. Most
morph into unbelievable control freaks focusing upon micro-managing details,
recruiting and games. We can watch the living archetype with Nick Saban at
Alabama and see the costs of it with what happened with Urban Meyer when he had
to take a sabbatical from the game to protect his health and sanity.

We need to remember that coaches are human
beings, and most of them stay in college because they love working with student
athletes and helping athletes grow as people as well as players. They enter
coaching as driven, smart and passionate human beings. But the ultra
competitive and hair trigger firing environment shapes them in ways most of
them would not choose to grow. Professional sports goes through coaches at a relentless
rate; the day after the end of the 2012 NFL season 7 head coaches and 5 general managers were fired. But NFL teams make no pretense to educate, care for and help young men
grow. Sadly most college coaches really do care about helping their student
athletes grow as humans as well as players, but they also know they are not
rewarded for the quality of humanity they instill in their students.

We can bemoan a lot of this, and it has
always been with us. Go back forty or fifty years and the same problems
existed, the same obsessions and the same corruptions. There was less money and
less TV exposure, but college sports, like most things in life, never had a time
of innocence.

The point I want to make here is that to a considerable extent the behavior of coaches and athletic directors is shaped
by the precarious demands of their jobs and the signals sent to them about
winning as the absolute priority. Even worse all the coaches see that moral
sluggards like Bobby
Petrino gets hired by whomever it was that hired him.

Despite the craziness most coaches still coach. In
most college sports they receive decent pay and graduate students and love their job,
their sports and their student athletes. Even at the crazed elite levels of the revenue sports you
still can see this shine through in quiet moments or early time before practice or team
meetings. But the players are not stupid, they are 19-22 years old, but they know their
coaches are on the firing line and they feel their own responsibility when a
coach gets fired.

I want to make clear that the problem here
ultimately lies with the Presidents and the boosters whom they serve. Every
coach who has been fired knows what it is like to be a hero one day and a
nonperson the next, wiped out of the history and marketing of the university as
thoroughly as Orwell would wipe someone out in 1984.

The good Presidents know they are complicit
and feel trapped, riding a tiger of revenue and passion they cannot ultimately
control. Most Presidents have far more important and deeper issues to attend to
than college athletics, but it takes an inordinate amount of their time and
accounts for most of the press their universities receive. Few like or enjoy
this, yet they continue to clamor to join Division 1A athletics and football even knowing the costs and losses.

I believe this anger and fear over being trapped accounts for much of the energy driving the
Presidents for modern reform. They may never get the TV money monster under
control, but they know they have to try. The changes in high school
requirements, progress towards degree, the penalties of APR and the new
attempts to deny access of NCAA championships tied to graduation rates all
create cumulative vectors to redirect some of the coaches’ energy towards
education and graduation of students. It also motivates athletic directors to
invest more money in academic and student support.

But here again, even as they struggle to
inflect academics back into the equations and change the incentive structure
for coaches, we know that some president somewhere will reliably hire a moral
failure like Bobby Petrino to coach again or that John Caliperi with two
vacated championships will be hired again.

At this time of pressure and absurdity,
the coaches face pressures and firing windows that exist in no other industry.
Yet they stay in. The vast majority live almost nomadic lives moving from team
to team when staffs are fired or they have a chance to move up. But the vast
majority still care about the student athletes. They still struggle to teach
about life along with sport; about learning along with winning.

These leaders live in a toxic system
sustained by world class educators. Some make huge salaries, most make good
salaries with very unstable and nomadic lives. They coach from passion and joy in their sport
and loyalty to their students. The incentives of the elite level and their
putative academic leaders often erode this, but they carry on. I salute them.

About Me

I teach at the University of Washington where I served as the faculty athletic representative. I created Point of the Game as a chance to reflect upon upon the role of sport in our society. Point of the Game seeks to be a conversation about about the nature of ethics in athletics and its relation to our human condition.